What men must learn is that there are some women in this world who are never satisfied, who move through their homes with the restlessness of dayworkers. Even their blood seems restless, rising and falling so that they are alternately pale or flushed, and suffer from dizzy spells and capricious moods. I am one of these women.
Sometimes Howard will ask, “What’s the matter with you?” or “What do you want?” But he knows that these are only mind mutterings. I want nothing. I want everything. I am given to looking through windows like a sentinel, fumbling through the mail as if for secret messages, picking up the telephone with renewed expectancy.
Hello, hello—but it is always someone I know.
Staring out through the bedroom window in the middle of the night, I wish that everyone else in the complex would wake, too, that lights would go on with the easy magic of stars in a Disney sky. I look at Howard, who is asleep, and I can see his eyes moving under those thin lids as he follows his dreams. I lean toward him, look more closely, and see his nostrils flare with his breath.
“Howard? Howard, I can’t sleep.”
He sighs deeply and his hands open at his sides as if in supplication, but he continues to sleep.
In the next room, the children are asleep.
Across the city, my mother and father sleep on high twin beds, like sister and brother. There is always a night-light, as decorous as a firefly, burning in their hallway, so that my father can find his way to the bathroom. There is a picture of me on the dresser in their bedroom, and another of the children. My father sleeps with his socks on, even in the summer. My mother keeps a handkerchief tied to the strap of her nightgown.
Do they dream of each other?
Does Howard dream of me?
If I ever sleep, I will have baroque dreams that would have challenged Freud, dreams that could be sold to the movies.
But I cannot sleep.
On other nights Howard pulls himself awake for a moment, glares at the clock, at my bedside light, at the pile of magazines, suitable for an invalid, balanced on my chest. “For God’s sake, go to sleep,” he hisses, as if it were a matter of choice.
Once I complained to my mother about my insomnia. She is old-fashioned and believes in remedies. “Drink milk,” she urged. “Do calisthenics. Open the window.”
My father, who likes to get a word in edgewise, said, “Forgetting.”
We never questioned his meaning.
But I am here alone in this stillness in which I have a dog’s sense of hearing, can hear beds creak, distant telephones, letters whispering down mail slots on every floor.
Who writes letters at this hour? Who is calling?
The dead eye of the television set faces me. If I turn it on, I will find old movie stars carrying on business as usual, stranded forever in time with their hairstyles and clothes. There will be a comedy and I will laugh, taking deep breaths. I will grow sleepy, child-sleepy, milk-warm and drifting, with arms heavy and legs that pull me down. Maybe there will be news, even at this hour. Isn’t it daytime in China, midnight in California? Surely there will be bad news and the ominous voice of the commentator to intone it. Ladies and gentlemen, here is some bad news that has just come in … Howard will wake, the children will cry out in their sleep, the old lady downstairs will bang on her ceiling with a broom.
I walk to the window again and there are other lights on in the complex—two or three.
At parties we go to, everyone complains of being an insomniac. Women insist they haven’t slept in years. One man walks the room repeating, “Three hours, three hours,” to anyone who will listen. He has a built-in alarm that never allows him to sleep a minute longer. That’s too bad, say the women who never sleep, but they are insincere. Another man suggests it is guilt that won’t let us sleep, but the women unite against him. Guilt? The truly guilty sleep to escape their guilt. Ask the ones with old mothers in nursing homes. Ask the ones whose children wet the beds, the ones whose husbands are listless or lonely. Someone changes the subject. We refill glasses.
It is not even too hot to sleep. It is a perfect summer night, with a breeze rushing in through the screens. The sheets aren’t sticky and hot.
Howard is sprawled in wonderful sleep.
I sit on the floor and place myself in the half-lotus position and clasp my hands behind my head. I draw my breath in deeply and then slowly let it out, lowering my right elbow to the floor. Then the left elbow. There is a carpet smell as I lower my head. It is not unpleasant. I look under the bed and see one of the children’s shoes lying on its side. I crawl there to get it and then I lie on my back, watching the changes in the box spring as Howard shifts his weight. From my position under the bed, I can see under the dresser and the night tables, where there are glints of paper clips and other lost and silvery things. There is a photograph that has fallen from the frame of the large mirror, and I crawl across the floor and reach for it. It is a picture of a group of friends at a party. We are all holding cocktail glasses and cigarettes. The women are sitting upright to make their breasts seem larger, and one of the men has his hand across his wife’s behind.
We are all going to grow old. The men will have heart attacks, the women will lose the loyalty of tissue in chins and breasts.
I want to go to the mirror and raise my nightgown and look at myself for reassurance. But I walk into the children’s room instead. Jason sleeps well and is a handsome child, and yet I am filled with sorrow at the sight of him. I see that it is all false—the posters of astronauts, the books to teach him of birds and fishes and flowers. The baby is in her crib, legs and arms opened as if sleep were a lover she welcomes. The Japanese mobile trembles a warning, and I tiptoe out and go into the kitchen.
I choose soft, quiet foods that will not disturb the silence: raisins, cheese, marshmallows. I put the last marshmallow on the end of a fork and toast it over the gas range.
I do not believe it, but I tell myself that I will be able to sleep with a full stomach. I take my mother’s advice and drink a glass of milk.
If I had a dog, if we were allowed to keep pets in the complex, the dog might be a companion when I cannot sleep. I had a dog when I was a child. When it was a few years old, I realized with horror I had established an irrevocable relationship that could only end in death. From this grew the knowledge that death was true of all relationships—friendships, marriage. I began to treat the dog indifferently, even cruelly sometimes, pushing him away when he jumped up to greet me. But it didn’t matter. The dog died and I mourned him anyway. For a long time I kept his dish and a gnawed rubber bone.
I suppose a dog awakened in the middle of the night would not understand. He would probably want to eat and be taken for a walk. And of course Howard is allergic to animal hair. We have a bowl of goldfish in the kitchen. There are two, one with beautiful silver overtones to his scales. There is a plant in their bowl and colored pebbles at the bottom. The fish swim as if they had a destination, around and around and around.
I shut the kitchen light and go back into the bedroom. I yawn twice, thinking, well, that’s a good sign. Sleep can’t be very far away and the main thing is not to panic. I climb into bed and Howard rolls away to his side.
God, it’s the silence, the large silence and the small, distant sounds. If I could talk, even shout, I might feel better. “I can’t sleep and life stinks on ice,” I whisper. Silence. I raise my voice slightly. “I can’t sleep and tomorrow, today, I won’t be able to stand anything.” Silence. “Howard, my mother and father didn’t want me to marry you. My mother said that you have bedroom eyes. My father said that you were not ambitious.”
A song I have not heard in years comes into my head. First I mouth the words. Then I try to whisper the tune. But my voice is throaty and full.
“Shhhh,” Howard warns in his sleep.
Oh, think, think. Come up with something else. But the song is stuck there. Doo-bee doo dee-dee, a song I never really liked. I try to overwhelm it with something symphonic. So this is what I’ve come to, I think, and the song leaves my head, like a bird from a tree. Instantly other birds flock in: shopping lists, the 20/20 line on the eye chart, a chain letter to which I never responded. Do not break the chain or evil will befall your house. Continue it and long life and good health will be yours to enjoy and cherish. In eight weeks you will receive 1,120 picture postcards from all over the world.
Will I?
Learned men wear copper bracelets. My mother weeps over broken mirrors. Hearts are broken, bones. They crack in the silence of the night.
Somewhere, in Chicago or St. Louis or Silver Springs, my old lover sleeps on his own side of a king-sized bed. He talks in his sleep and his wife promptly wakes, thin-lipped, alert. In a careful whisper, she questions him. “Who?” she asks. “When? Where?” My lover mumbles something she cannot make out. She plucks gently at the hair on his chest, in shrewd imitation of my style. “Who?” she asks again.
In Howard’s dream he is in the war again. His eyes roll frantically and his legs brace against the sheets.
I whisper, “We’re pulling out now, men.”
His head swivels.
“For Christ’s sake, keep down.”
His hands grope at his side, sling a rifle.
“Aaargh,” I say. “They got me. Die, you bastards!”
The bed shakes with his terror.
“Shh,” I say. “It’s only a dream. Only a dream.”
But he’ll die anyway. In this bed, perhaps.
Howard in a coffin. Howard in the earth. Good-bye, Howard.
He sighs, resigned.
I walk to the foot of the bed and stand in a narrow bar of moonlight. My white nightgown is silver and my arms glow as if they were wet. “Look at this, Howard,” and I grasp the hem of my gown and twirl it around my body. Then I lift myself onto the balls of my feet and turn slowly, catching my reflection in the mirror, spectral, lovely.
I dip, arch and move across the floor in a silent, voluptuous ballet. “Hey, get a load of this,” and I do something marvelously intricate, unlearned. My feet move like small animals. Wow, I think, and Howard flings himself onto his stomach in despair.
I am breathing hard now and I sit in the rocking chair and think of my lover again. His wife has given up the inquisition, but now she can’t sleep, either. She goes to the window in Chicago or Silver Springs and gazes sullenly at her property, at her pin oaks and her hemlock, at the children’s swings hung in moonlight, at telephone wire stretched into infinity. She pats the curlers on her head and goes into the next room to look at her children.
Across town, my father walks to the bathroom. “What’s the matter?” my mother asks.
“Nothing. What do you think?”
Before he comes back to bed, she is plunged into sleep again.
Howard, Howard, Howard. Prices are going up. The house is on fire. My lover is dying of something awful.
My lover is dying, his wife at his side. She is wearing a hat and a coat with a fox collar. She leans over him. “Who?” she persists, and her fierce breath makes the oxygen tent flutter like Saran Wrap.
“Howard. My lover is dying in St. Louis or Chicago. No one really cares, Howard.”
Real tears fill my eyes and then roll down my cheeks.
I climb into bed again. If I had a hobby, something to take my mind away. A dog.
I yawn, lowering myself carefully to the pillow. Ah, almost there, almost there, I tell myself in encouragement. One minute you’re awake and the next you’re in dreamland.
I shut my eyes.
That’s right. Shut your eyes. Here comes the Sandman. Here comes dream dust. Here comes.
My eyes are shut tight. My hands are clenched.
I hear something. There is a noise somewhere in the apartment. Maybe I am asleep and only dreaming noise. Maybe I hear the goldfish splashing in their bowl. My eyes open.
What’s that? What’s that?
Oh, God.
The whole damn world sleeps like a baby—the superintendent of our building, the new people on the tenth floor, old boyfriends and their wives, their mothers and fathers, their babies, their dogs. Everyone sleeps.
All of the bastards at those parties are liars. They sleep, too, cunningly, maybe with their eyes open, for all I know. They dissolve, they give in, they go under—into the blue and perfect wonder of sleep.
I am the only one here. I am the only one left in the dark world, the only one who cares enough to stay awake the long and awful night.
(1974)